


snapshots

by Kierkegarden



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Framed arc, Angst, Barriss Offee Character Study, F/F, Femslash February, Freeform, Graphic Violence, I could get diagnostic but I'll refrain, Mostly Canon Compliant, Underage Kissing, War, but more like Femslash every month of the year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 02:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13560882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kierkegarden/pseuds/Kierkegarden
Summary: Barriss Offee's Fall is book-ended by snapshots of Ahsoka Tano losing everything.





	snapshots

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the first nor will it be the last Barriss Offee character study that I write, but it may be the only one I post. I am eternally saddened by the way her character was treated in The Clone Wars and so if she's going to Fall, I'm going to make her Fall right, with Ahsoka on her mind and the screams of innocents ringing in her ears.
> 
> (Also, I promise I don't *only* write angsty character studies. No, my fingers aren't crossed, ssh.)

The first and the last thing Barriss thinks about is Ahsoka: what that wide, radiant smile would look like shriveled into nothingness, devoid of hope, like Barriss is increasingly. It’s something she’s always done, but more so recently: picturing what the people she loves would look like if they lost everything. Barriss knows how circles build behind eyes, vertebrae sink into a perpetual slump. There are a couple things wrong with the habit, perhaps, Barriss thinks - the love and the loss and the fact that she’s gone from imagining this clinically, as an isolated theoretical, to imagining how hard it’s going to be - and it’s going to happen. It’s only a matter of time.

 

Barriss thinks in snapshots. 

 

From the cramped airship on Geonosis, buried under rock, Ahsoka’s face burns with hope in front of her. Ahsoka’s hand clasped in hers, Ahsoka’s breath dying as hers dies with it. Ahsoka’s lip bleeding as she bites down in concentration, focusing on the signal, focusing on saving. Barriss. 

 

Things that are buried never die where they are supposed to, underneath rock and debris. All good things die in the light. Except for hope, Barriss thinks. Barriss should have died.

 

Barriss sees so many people who  _ shouldn’t _ have died on a daily basis for the rest of her time in the war. Twi’lek mothers lying bloodied with helpless babies still trying to nurse from their breasts and Twi’lek mothers sobbing over children who they shouldn’t have lived to see die. Twi’lek fathers salting graves with their tears because they tried and they failed and that was all they ever had. Barriss wants off of Ryloth, she wants to see something else other than dying Twi’leks, she wants to see change, compassion, peace. 

It turns out that nobody looks good dying and nothing’s different anywhere. It’s the same story rewritten in a multitude of different languages: temples destroyed, marketplaces bombed, clankers marching line by line trying to outshine every star system with their boxy gilded frames. Barriss wants them to stop translating it. She wants to write something new. 

 

She slows her breath during meditation and wonders if she could will it to stop completely. 

 

Barriss thinks in the reels of durasteel wire that barricade her emotions from seeping out.

 

She notices, one day, that the clones firing blasters begin to look like droids under the dying light of another retelling of the same twisted story. Barriss pushes the bacta patch into the wound on one of their chests in the medic tent. Everything smells like iron, filth and disease. The sky is dark but Barriss can’t see any stars, only laser bolts chasing each other back and forth. Her ears learn to recognize artillery fire as silence. Her eyes learn to recognize a lost cause. She moves to the next clone, her eyes as robotic as a droid as she wipes the sweat droplets off of his shoulder and readies her needle to stitch the gash. Blood isn’t red any more to Barriss, it’s as dull and grey as the metal frame of her bunk or the cityscape outside the temple.

 

The first thing that Barriss thinks about is Ahsoka before her eyes flicker golden for the first time. Ahsoka, to which she owes this unchosen life and at the time, she’s certain that the fact that she would _die_ for Ahsoka means a lot less than the fact she would kill for her.  _ And she would. _

 

Barriss thinks about Ahsoka’s strong arms pressed around her in a neverlettingyougo hug, their lips pressed firm and tight and claiming, her heart extending tendrils that link her to at least a dozen people and she realizes - Ahsoka isn’t like the rest of this machine. Like Barriss, Ahsoka is tangential, caught in the inertia of this landslide. Barriss loves her as she feels herself Fall.

 

The sky still hasn't lit back up when Barris is called back to the temple for her knighting and she laughs as she plays her part soundly as ever. As Master Unduli shears her braid with a sizzle, she realizes that her Master is one of the batteries that makes the machine run. Her laughter turns cold because Master Unduli will never be required to go on another mission with her again and will likely never request it. 

 

Bounty hunters collect credits and part ways. Sith will drop their apprentices as soon as they fear them, without a second thought. Barriss reads stories of villainy and treachery and savagery and replaces the made-up names with the names of the Order in her head. Nothing seems out of place. She imagines how Master Unduli’s face would look if she lost everything and realizes, with surprise, that it looks exactly the same. Barriss Falls another parsec down.

 

Three nights after Barriss’s knighting, Ahsoka comes to her new quarters with a blazing smile that will never be put out and without any warning, hops into her bed and deeper into her heart. Wrestling with the sheets, she presses kiss after kiss, little ones across Barriss’s nose and eyes and longer, more sultry ones to her mouth.

“I am so proud of you,” Ahsoka smiles into her ear as they cuddle in the dimming light, Coruscanti grey a patented mood through the window, “I knew you would be knighted when I got back, I could feel it.”

“Yes, well,” Barriss feels herself smiling honestly for the first time in a year, “I didn’t think I ever would.”

Ahsoka is independent, a little leaf on a strong, powerful current and Barriss knows she is too late to pull her out.

 

Barriss’s world closes on that same grey skyline and when it opens again, blood looks red and smells like iron and the whole facade is ripped apart anew. She is wading through a mountain of bodies, bodies that could fill entire system’s worth of graves. Living beings start to become bodies to Barriss and she no longer counts clones by their names or even by their numbers - just  _ bodies, bodies, bodies. _

Barriss finds that she is more efficient at saving people if they stop being people and start being vessels, synthetic though their flesh may be, laboratory-made to be freckled with bolt wounds. 

She reads in the bunk on her ship about the ways of the dark side in books she is trusted to oppose as a Jedi Knight. She moves with the machine and spends her time in the temple in the library, like she did as a Padawan.

Instead of romantic holonovels about the great battles of history, Barriss gorges herself on new material. Demolitions, tactics, dark side abilities. She encounters one particularly interesting Sith ability that could serve her purposes - the thought bomb. Shuddering at the illustrations in the ancient tome, a vortex stretched together by gaunt, tortured faces, Barriss’s eyes flicker with images of Ahsoka’s caught among them.

She delivers it back to Master Nu, breath heaving.

“Is everything alright, my young Barriss? I sense great distress within you.”

Barriss pulls her face on center with the machine.

“The Sith have done such terrible things, Master Nu, it is hard for me to believe it.”

The librarian nods.

 

Lying awake, Barriss doesn’t have to believe it. She’s seen things more terrible than the girl she left behind at Geonosis had thought could be true. Barriss should have died. She watches seams of families ripped apart as she sews seams of skin back together. War seems as eternal as the Force and just as easily corrupted.

She dreams of Ahsoka’s voice, hoarse from screaming at her, pleading. Ahsoka on her knees, looking up at her, eyes oceans - and Barriss is drowning, pulling herself up in desperation, spluttering as the salty waves crash around her. Ahsoka is the line between Barriss and what Barriss could be.

 

The last thing Barriss thinks about is Ahsoka. The plan is in place, the bomb is set, and she’s committed herself to this path. A machine without a controller lays waste to galaxies and she’s read of what the Jedi can be - should be - and what they are not. Ahsoka’s smile is extinguished in her mind as Barriss takes the pilot’s seat and crashes this old, rusty machine right into the ground.

Severing attachments is only possible, Barriss thinks, when you believe in the cause. And Barriss feels hope within her, yellow and hissing and bright.

 

The first and the last thing Barriss thinks about is Ahsoka, but the last thing she sees is the shadow of a boxy headdress in the hallway as the guards push her past, faster, like a chained beast into an open grave. The blur is too fast for Barriss to see Master Unduli’s face, to find out what it looks like as it loses everything.

 

If the light had been cast differently that day, perhaps she would have faltered, but Coruscanti skies are so grey - so vast - so unchanging.


End file.
